by Scot Siegel
hard to believe an entire generation
of American children
have grown up in a foreign country
where the anti-war poets, feeling nostalgic
& pathetic, thud our sooty windows
like finches drunk on toxic hedge funds
while the unemployed, mentally ill, and others
incarcerated in upside-down mortgages
wipe the daily grime away and drink from
a cracked urn called the-American-Dream-
on-Trickle-Down-Lies-Ambush-Economics
& other toxic drivel too disturbing to name here . . .
hard to believe so many still get up and go to
school or college or what's left of the jobs
most mornings believing something
better is about to happen . . .
O these days, what I would give
for a new administration, my grandfather's generation
O what I would give for a few rogue epiphanies!
an early inauguration; the next WPA
Scot Siegel is a poet and land use planner from Oregon, where he serves on the board of trustees for the Friends of William Stafford. He is the author of Some Weather (Plain View Press, 2008), and Untitled Country, a chapbook due out from Pudding House Publications in 2009.
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